"Main Street Soldier" a haunting portrait of addiction

Posted by Alison Gillmor, CBC Reviewer | Friday March 8, 2013

His face, bruised and creased by decades of tough living, is unforgettable.

—Alison Gillmor, reviewer

When Main Street Soldier first showed back in 1972, this indelible character study by Winnipeg-born filmmaker Leonard Yakir got slammed.

Following
World War II vet Ray LeClair as he wanders through an alcoholic haze,
the documentary must have seemed like a shockingly frank and foulmouthed
record of mean streets and hard times.

Today, it feels like an
extraordinary evocation of a period and a place, as Yakir shoots the
North End of the early 1970s with stark poetry. The daytime shots are
mostly bleak industrial landscapes--rail yards and decaying
factories--while the night shots are neon-lit sidewalks lined with
cut-price store windows and rundown hotels.

Main Street Soldier is also an absolutely haunting portrait of addiction. LeClair was just a guy Yakir
had met in a Main Street bar, but he's a magnetic screen presence,
whether he's waking up with the shakes in his rooming-house bed or
roaming the neighbourhood looking for a few fleeting moments of
companionship. His face, bruised and creased by decades of tough living,
is unforgettable.

At a compact 35 minutes, the film is shot and cut with a cinéma vérité casualness that parallels LeClair's drunken aimlessness. But there's also a stageyness to it, a reflection of LeClair's outsized personality.

Filmmaker Leonard Yakir

"I'm the biggest actor in the world," he announces at one point. Like many addicts, he's become a performer in his own life, and he lurches through emotions with bewildering speed. He's elaborately polite and then nasty and abusive. He's sentimental and then cynical. He's a panhandler bumming for coins and then a big-shot dispensing wisdom.

LeClair is a big talker, a beer-parlour philosopher, and possibly a complete fabulist. In one indelible scene, he's shown, drunkenly ecstatic, dancing to old-timey country & western music in the Bell Hotel.

Watching the film now, it's interesting to wonder what has changed. The street scenes throw up some familiar markers, but the landscape of Main Street has transformed, mostly for the better.

Unfortunately, the landscape of alcoholism and addiction remains tragically the same.

It should be pointed out that the film scene has also changed. Main Street Soldier is something of a landmark in Winnipeg's history of independent filmmaking. Remember, this was before Cinematheque, before the Winnipeg Film Group, before Telefilm funding. Yakir, who later worked on the culty Dennis Hopper film Out of the Blue (1980), was just out there doing his thing.

Yakir, who's currently based in Brooklyn, will be at the Cinematheque to introduce Main Street Soldier, along with his recent film The Ruby Concerts, a portrait of celebrated classical flutist Carol Wincenc.An Evening With Leonard Yakir runs Friday, March 8 at Cinematheque.